I’ve been quiet about Skyrim on here because, really, I don’t have anything nice to say. I mostly rebought it on PC as a point of comparison to Dragon’s Dogma and found it unexciting. I still think it’s a technically impressive, if buggy, game, but it desperately needs an actual writer or at least somebody to explain that nobody gives a crap about Tamriel to the entire Bethesda team.

A friend of mine, a true evangelist playing the series since the DOS days, invited me over to try Hearthfire on his Xbox 360. This was new! This was exciting! This totally adds to the dynamics of the game! This will change your mind!

And he’s right. It did. This makes me want to find Alduin and code in a new dialogue tree that lets me team up with him to dragonshout Nirn out of existence.

If there’s one word I could use to describe Hearthfire it’s “self-satisfied”. This is really nothing more than the more boring parts of Fable smushed together with a poor man’s Minecraft. It’s fairly straightforward. Build a house, hire employees, adopt annoying little brats, marry somebody, and discover that this is actually all kind of horrible and unpleasant and draining. The game acts like you should be grateful to it for giving you this opportunity, for turning what should be fun into a job.

This isn’t a game mechanic. It’s a Tamogotchi with delusions of grandeur. Granted that this is entirely optional, but the entire appeal of the game was hunting down dragons, killing them, and generally trashing the place. Now you have to do all that, but you also have the almighty pain in the ass of maintaining a home and family while you do it. None of these people can, apparently, do a goddamn thing for themselves, as my friend demonstrated repeatedly. I haven’t seen a game so nakedly manipulative since Nintendogs, where booting it up after leaving it for a week showed you a sad, dirty puppy.

If you disagree with me, and I’m sure many do, play someone else’s game. When you have zero emotional investment in the character, suddenly a lot becomes clear about the game and Hearthfire, and none of it is nice. This is an attempt to get you to keep playing the game long after you should have dumped it by getting you emotionally invested in the “world”. Anything to keep you buying DLC, because selling twelve million copies of the game just wasn’t enough money.

That’s really kind of vile, and worse, the content is unengaging (children in Skyrim turn out only to be fun as cannon fodder). In general, there’s a tendency to upsell in gaming lately that’s irritating. I’m spending $60 on Borderlands 2 and Gearbox is already excitedly talking about the $30 DLC season passes they’re going to sell. Not to me you’re not, guys.

Meanwhile Blizzard is whining about how people aren’t obsessively playing Diablo III forever and ever like they’ve got lives or something, Resident Evil 6 is trying to get me to join a crappy version of Facebook so I can buy my characters fancy pants and show my friends how many zombies I’ve kicked in the nards, and now Bethesda wants to me to marry a goddamn game and make a life with it.

The pleasant thing about a game eating your life for a while is that eventually it lets go. You complete the quest. You beat the game. You win. That’s the entire idea. It’s part of why we game, to feel that sense of achievement, of completion.

Game developers apparently are no longer satisfied with that and want me to be their girlfriend, or at least what they think is a girlfriend. Instead they’re turning into a creepy stalker. So, come on, Alduin. Let’s do this thing. This planet has outstayed its welcome.

It seems you do not get Elder Scrolls. The whole thing is about emersion in the world and adventure. An optional addon to deepen that is appealing to some of its players. I don’t know why they had the guy who doesn’t get the series write on it.

I’m not slagging people who like the game, but if you don’t already have an emotional investment in the series, Skyrim is not going to build that. And frankly, I found games like “Dragon’s Dogma” to be far more immersive and engaging.

I actually like skyrim but I definitely see your point. Modability and expansions can help extend a games life (M2TW) but iff they want to keep people playing for longer what they need to do is make the world friggin enormous like in Daggerfall. I still play that almost as much as skyrim and have just as much fun because the game world is so big and you can do damn near anything. I never even started the main story quest! I’m too busy running from town to town, bashing-in random doors and stealing stuff to try to save up enough money to buy a boat to escape the bank because they want the money I borrowed to buy a house back. Can’t do any of that in Skyrim.

Is this just a troll article meant to stir up controversy and get views?

In general, somebody should have informed you that TES is not known for cheap thrills. Fortunately, not everyone has ADHD. Skyrim is more for those gamers. Those of us who like sitting in the College of Winterhold reading dusty old tomes, or wandering the countryside and searching for alchemical ingredients. It may not be for everybody. In fact, as a hardcore TES fan I’m actually shocked that the game has had such mainstream success but I just chalk it up to a lot of people liking the sandbox. For immersive roleplaying, TES is where it’s at. If that bores you, fine. Find something “cooler”, Johnny Headshot.

In specific, Hearthfire is a cheap optional DLC that one can get if they decide that starting a homestead is a part of their roleplaying experience. Too bad nobody told Bethesda that almost nobody roleplays in roleplaying games anymore. But again, it’s optional. This is like me whining that Dragon’s Dogma’s token-finding DLC makes me want to burn down Gransys. No, you know what I did when I read that the DLC was nothing but hunting down stupid tokens? I didn’t frakking buy it — problem solved. I guess some people want to pay real money for fake ‘quests’ that just boil down to trading money for virtual gold and XP. But that doesn’t make me angry at Dragon’s Dogma any more than the fact that some people want to build homes in Skyrim should invoke your anger.

Speaking of Dragon’s Dogma, you called it ‘immersive’. You keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means. Dragon’s Dogma was many good things. Immersive was hardly one of them. You’re stuck in third person, outside of your character’s body. You can’t interact with 99% of things in the world. I sometimes felt immersed walking down a dusty road with my companions, but such feelings were brief and rare. It can’t be helped if you don’t feel immersed in Skyrim, but at least unlike Dragon’s Dogma, the elements are actually there for it to happen. Let’s put it this way: Morrowind is the standard for immersion. Which game feels more like Morrowind, DD or TESV?

By “immersion” I mean “actually giving a s*** about a single thing going on.” Here’s a useful yardstick: in the opening of Skyrim, you’re a guy who just randomly blundered into some country which has decided to behead you for existing, and then their village gets trashed by a dragon while you run away. In Dragon’s Dogma, a dragon attacks your village, you try to stab it, and then it rips your heart out and says “COME AT ME, BRO!”